Lucy Snowe, in flight from an unhappy past, leaves England and finds work as a teacher in Madame Beck`s school in `Villette`. Strongly drawn to the fiery autocratic schoolmaster Monsieur Paul Emanuel, Lucy is compelled by Madame Beck`s jealous interference to assert her right to love and be loved.

Based in part on Charlotte Brontë`s experience in Brussels ten years earlier, Villette (1853) is a cogent and dramatic exploration of a woman`s response to the challenge of a constricting social environment. Its deployment of imagery comparable in power to that of Emily Brontë`s Wuthering Heights , and its use of comedynullironic or exuberantnullin the service of an ultimately sombre vision, make Villette especially appealing to the modern reader.